Monday, March 23, 2009

A Shocking First for the Tennessee Women

A couple of weeks ago, I was expecting a late-afternoon phone call from Pat Summitt. An hour passed after the appointed time, then an hour and a half. Finally the phone rang. Summitt was apologetic.

“I came home and fell asleep,” she said. “It’s been that kind of season.”

A trying, exhausting season came to a stunningly premature conclusion on Sunday night as fifth-seeded Tennessee, the two-time defending national women’s champion, lost to 12th-seeded Ball State, 71-55, in the first round of the Berkeley Region in Bowling Green, Ky.

It is difficult to overstate how unprecedented and unexpected the Lady Vols’ defeat was. This is a program that has won eight national titles and is the only university to have made the field every year since the N.C.A.A. began sponsoring a women’s tournament in 1982.

Until Sunday, the Lady Vols were 42-0 in first and second-round games. Meanwhile, Ball State (26-8) was making its first appearance in the tournament. The Cardinals were led by the senior guard Porchia Green, who delivered 23 points and 8 rebounds.

Some will say this game ranks among the greatest upsets in the tournament’s history. On reputation, perhaps, but Tennessee had lost its entire starting lineup from the 2007-8 season, including the country’s consensus best player in Candace Parker.

The Lady Vols (22-11) struggled to find consistency all season in 2008-09 with a young roster and did not win the Southeastern Conference tournament. Never had the Lady Vols been seeded as low as fifth in the N.C.A.A. field. This was Summitt’s youngest team in her three and a half decades at Tennessee, one that included seven freshmen and that did not inspire the fear in opponents that its predecessors had.

No one expected Tennessee to three-peat as national champion. Still, no one expected the Lady Vols to be ousted in the first round, either.

“I like our personnel,” Summitt said in our conversation. “The difficult part for me is that young kids give in to fatigue. The hardest part is to have players come into the program and not understand our culture and how hard you have to play.”

She still relished going to practice every day and molding callow players into champions, said Summitt, the only college coach, male or female, to have won 1,000 career games.

“I’ll love it when we get a little tougher,” she said.

On Sunday, the Lady Vols were not tough enough, at least after halftime, when the 6-foot-6 center Kelly Cain could not take the court. She aggravated an injury to her right knee, the same knee that needed surgery last season and forced Cain to redshirt as a freshman.

Afterward, Summitt congratulated Kelly Packard, Ball State’s first-year coach. Then Summitt told ESPN that the defeat was “one of the toughest losses I ever had to deal with at Tennessee.”

She was characteristically unflinching in criticizing her team’s performance as too soft.

“We never really seemed to defend one on one,” Summitt said. “They were a lot tougher physically, more aggressive. They made shots. We didn’t come ready to play.”

A couple weeks earlier, as our conversation ended, I told Summitt that she and her team would undoubtedly be back on top in a year or two.

“Two years?” she said with a laugh and her famous impatience. “I may be in the nuthouse. I can’t do that.”

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